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Sunday, February 28, 2010

My theory for Lost

Well, I finally was able to catch up with Lost episodes... I saw seasons 1 and 2 back when it was on TV but due to life getting in the way, I did not watch the rest. Thanks to Netflix, that problem was solved in this last three weeks. As with several of the Lost fans, I also developed a couple of theories for the mysteries in the Lost universe. If you haven't watched this season's first two episodes, the standard SPOILER WARNING applies.

The basis for my theory starts with the nature of the island. I'm surely not the first one to propose that the island is a boat. There are evidences for this: it was in the bottom of the sea after the nuke incident, it is able to move. But the interesting question is on who built this special boat, and how is it able to travel through time? I think that the the ability of time/space travel comes from the fact that this is a boat developed in the future, in a time where space travel is possible. You probably heard that the biggest proof time travel is not possible is that we don't see any visitors from the future... The Dr. Brown of our sea-DeLorean was this guy, called Jacob. And the electromagnetic pockets the Dharma Initiative guys have been poking in the late 70s are the flux capacitor. But how about the Smoke monster?

Jacob also needed help to manage this big ship, so he developed a security system. In the beginning it was just a monitoring and diagnosis program responsible for taking care of everything and preventing people who accidentally got to the island from learning too much. But the program was very smart and in a HAL-9000 way, it became sentient and unruly. That is how the smoke monster became Jacob's nemesis. That's how Jacob lost control of the island. And the rules referred to all the time were the hard coded programs written in the security system (think of Asimov's laws) and why the smoke monster could not kill Jacob.

Now to the visitors. We have the Kahana travelers, The Others, the Dharma Initiative, the Losties, the French expedition, the Black Rock, etc... all these people end up in this mysterious place where bizarre things happen - which I attribute to the electromagnetic pockets, the smoke monster fooling around and Jacob's attempt to protect the island. Naturally they'll develop a belief, a religious link to the island. The funny thing is that once they start believing in the supernatural, they will do whatever they can to make sure they do what "the island wants". But because of the time travels, characters are able to make sure that what they believe the island wants becomes a self-fulfilled prophecy. Like Eloise Hawking killing her son. She knew that would happen, and she believed it was essential that the murder happened. So she made sure Daniel Faraday would be there.

There is much more to my theory, but it'll take too long to write everything here. I just wanted to put this post on. In case my theory is right.